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The Super Bowl and New York’s Economy

By Catherine Rampell February 6, 2012 3:16 pmFebruary 6, 2012 3:16 pm

Doug Mills/The New York Times

After the Super Bowl ended on Sunday, a friend asked me if I thought the Giants’ victory would be good for the New York economy. A few economists have looked into this question, and the answer is probably yes, but if so, only to a small degree.

That research found that the city of the winner of the Super Bowl experiences a statistically significant increase of roughly $140 in per capita income. The authors said this finding could be because of a “feel-good effect” upon locals that makes them more productive. But they fully admitted that the correlation could be a total fluke.

This 2005 paper, on the other hand, found that winning the Super Bowl is correlated with a smaller increase in income — about $50 to $60 per capita — but that the result is not statistically significant.
Yet another study — written in 2008 by Michael C. Davis of the Missouri University of Science and Technology and Christian M. End of Xavier University — suggests that not only does the Super Bowl increase per capita income modestly, but that merely improving the win-loss record for a bad N.F.L. team also appears to raise local incomes. The effect fades as a team gets better and better. The authors say they are not sure whether they would attribute this effect to greater spending or increased worker productivity.

All that said, lots of economic studies have found that it’s not worth it for a city to subsidize the building of a new sports stadium if it is expecting the new stadium to improve the local economy. Generally speaking, the cost to taxpayers outweighs the local economic benefits. Other studies have found that being the site of a major sports event like the Super Bowl or the Olympics is also not a good economic investment.

For more on the economics of winning the Super Bowl, see this post from the Sports Economist blog.

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